Jane Austen and Her Times by G. E. Mitton

Author:G. E. Mitton [Mitton, G. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

The third period, that of the great men who were actually contemporary with Jane Austen, though she was unconscious of their existence, as they did not win their laurels until after her death, is of course much less interesting, and may be quickly dismissed, such names as those of Lingard and Hallam among historians; Mill, Hazlitt, and De Quincey belong by right of birth to an earlier epoch, though their works place them in this.

Miss Ferrier and Miss Mitford, too, were not much younger than Jane Austen, but neither had brought out anything noticeable before her death. Miss Ferrier’s first novel, Marriage, made its appearance in 1818; and though Miss Mitford had written poems, her Our Village first appeared in the Lady’s Magazine only in 1819. As we have seen, Miss Mitford was a scholar at the same school as Jane Austen, though many years later. She was also a native of Jane’s county, Hants.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century were born among poets: Shelley, Keats, Hood, Keble, and Mrs. Hemans; among historians, Grote, Alison, Napier, Carlyle, and Thirlwall; among men of science, Faraday and Lyell; and among novelists, Marryat.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century we have a string of great names; a trio of poets: Tennyson, Longfellow, and Browning; men of science such as Darwin; historians such as Macaulay; novelists in numbers, such as Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Reade, Harrison Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton, and Trollope; statesmen such as Gladstone and Disraeli.

Perhaps no forty years that could have been chosen at any period of English history would have covered such a variety of talent, and that of such a high order, as was given to the world during Jane Austen’s brief life. And if she did not know personally the men whose names have lived with her own, at all events she drew from their works inspiration and knowledge, and she herself was not by any means the least among so mighty a company.

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